As we wind down on our cohort 28 boot camp, we had the privilege of hosting a Lead software developer with over 14 years’ experience in Software Engineering in the person of Omotayo Iginla, Head Technology Operations & Support at Capricorn Digital Limited, the owner and operator of the payment platform, Baxi to mentor our participants on how to build a successful business and career in the FinTech Industry.
The session, Tayo titled “Building a Scalable Fintech Engineering” lasted for about 2 hours with insightful information dished out from his wealth of experience to give our participants the much-needed competitive advantage, be it they want to build a career or products in FinTech.
Tayo took a holistic view of the topic covering various essential areas ranging from:
What Fintech is and the different niches in Fintech such as Payment Gateways, Neobanks, RoboAdvisor, Lending App, Cryptocurrency, Remittance, P2P, Prepaid Cards just to mention a few, thus opening their minds to various ways they could be a player should they also want to create products in the fintech space.
He described the Fintech eco system as a closed one where players depend on one another to render their chosen service effectively. As such, development efforts revolve largely around integration to various services and development of APIs/Webservices.
He emphasized the need for them to be conversant with the two major aspects of Fintech namely: The Business (Operation) side and the Technology side as a prerequisite for success while dissecting these two aspects to the delight of his audience.
He noted how bad engineering practices can undermine the success of any FinTech product sharing with our participants real-life examples of software faults, security breaches and their mitigations.
According to Tayo, Software Engineers building Fintech products must build scalability into their products right from the ground up as a single government policy can lead to user explosion overnight. He described database design techniques and query optimization that can allow for scalability, how to overcome Concurrency & Multithreading Challenges, the need to version their APIs, techniques to mitigate Man in The Middle attacks (MiM) among others.
He shared some of the best practices that are essential for building a fintech product such as :
IP whitelisting, application of rate limits, logging of requests, use of design patterns such as those proposed by the Gang of Four (GoF) to solve recurring software design issues, adhering strictly to the HTTP verbs for implementing functionalities etc.
He further admonished the participant to get themselves acquitted with the regulations guiding the industry well enough before engaging in Fintech so as not to get into trouble.
Tayo provided answers to the following questions among others, during the interactive Questions-and-Answers segment:
· What are employers/recruiters looking out for in a junior developer?
· How can one distinguish oneself in the industry?
· What communities can one belong to and how to build one's network in the Fintech space
'Tayo in bringing the session to a close encouraged the participants to exude excellence in all they do as this will set them apart when they come into the industry.
